Take your Bibles now and turn to Mark, chapter 10. Mark, chapter 10. We return to Mark this morning. Gospel of Mark, chapter 10, starting in verse 1. It says this, and he left there and went to the region of Judah and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as it was his custom, he taught them. And Pharisees came up, and in order to test him, asked, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? And he answered them, What did Moses command you? And they said, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away. And Jesus said to them, Because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. But therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. And in the house, the disciples asked him again about this matter. And he said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.

The word of the Lord. Amen. You may be seated. Grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever.

Very often in preparing for teaching or preaching, it comes to mind the cultural context that we’re in, and I was reminded, in considering this, the worldview of the culture, the zeitgeist of the age, and the movies that are prevalent that feed into this and shape our culture, encouraging our permission in sins, right, not only advocating but celebrating them. And to be sure, in those contexts, the greatest good is the self, right, the self. And so as we look at this text and this topic, I want to be very careful with this text regarding divorce. And I know it’s inevitable that some of you have experienced divorce. And so I understand those who come to the subjects like this, texts like this, there’s a danger in when we do so in speaking in such a way that condemnation can be felt and at times unnecessarily. If you haven’t experienced this personally, divorce, all of us in this room have been affected or in one way or another touched by broken marriages, whether it be our own ourselves or our own parents or families or loved ones. We have all in the culture that we’re in been near enough and affected to this particular issue. Some of you in this room simply love and delight in your marriages, and we praise God for that. I can’t comprehend how something like this even needs to be discussed. And yet there are some, though you’ve never experienced divorce or even considered it, are in some sense suffering through what may feel like a troublesome or a loveless marriage. And so I get that all of us come here before a text like this in very different circumstances. And my hope is to try to at least put before us what this text is mainly aiming at, and we see what the Lord has for us here. And you’ll see, because of that, some of you will be disappointed by what we go over, because we’re not gonna cover all the subjects that you want to be covered. But I do want to say that the sermon is not aimed at your past, which neither you nor I can undo. It’s aimed at where you are presently. The sermon is not aimed at answering every question about divorce and remarriage and what constitutes all the particular exceptions to what Christ is saying here. And I do want to say that as a Reformed confessional church, we do believe there are some exceptions to the marriage clause, namely adultery and desertion. but this is not what Christ is after in this text, okay? He’s not here to give us all the hard cases and then base our new law upon. He’s here to tell us something far different than that. This morning, I want us to aim at the main thing that Jesus is seeking to communicate in hopes of reorienting or reprogramming our way of thinking about marriage and divorce, and indeed about the marriages that we are in. Or if you’re unmarried, and you’re seeking marriage, the marriage that you will be in, Lord willing. And hopefully to reshape, as I said, this in such a way that we can go out of here today ready as disciples of Christ to really thank God’s thoughts after him in this regard and in all things and to agree with him about this particular institution that he has ordained, marriage.

The Test

And so with that in mind, this morning, I want us to look at Mark chapter 10 and begin with our first point, and that is the test, the test, right? You’ll notice that Mark tells us that Jesus has left the region he was in, and he comes and enters Judea. And as he enters there, it says, the crowds followed him, gathered around him, and he begins to teach them, which was his custom. Pretty soon, as most of our stories go this way, including Mark, that others approached, namely the Pharisees. And they come and they have a question for Jesus. But we’re told right off the bat that this is no innocent question. They aren’t coming for advice. They’re not coming because they’re having marital problems. They’re not coming because they want to clean up their theology regarding marriage and divorce. They’re coming according to this text why? It says they come with a question in order to test him, in order to test him. And that word is only going to be used four times in Mark. And the first time that we encounter this word, it’s remember in chapter one, where it says that the Spirit of God drove Jesus into the world, I’m sorry, into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, tested by the devil, same word. The only other time that that word is used is always in relation to the Pharisees and how they approach Christ. And so we’re seeing the Pharisees are siding with a particular voice that’s already been introduced in the Gospel of Mark, and that is the devil, the tempter. They’re coming in hopes of tempting Christ in order that he may fail this test, and therefore, his ministry will lose credibility, and even more, maybe, as we’ll see. They come with a question, and they say, is it proper, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? And in one sense, we realize this is a completely disingenuous question, because even in Judaism at the time, there was no disagreement of the answer to this question across the spectrum of views that were held. Every Jew, every rabbi, no matter how conservative or liberal, would have answered this question in the affirmative. Yes, there are times when it’s permissible for a man to divorce his wife. And you can look through the different schools historically of the rabbis. There were more conservative schools, which said that the text in Deuteronomy was that if there was some sort of sexual immorality or indecency on the part of the wife that the man could leave, could divorce his wife. The other more liberal side of the spectrum points out that Deuteronomy, the text says, if he finds in her indecency in anything, he’s permitted. One of you wants to focus on indecency. The other one wants to focus on the phrase in anything. And that more liberal view basically says if there’s any sort of change, dispositional change in you as a husband towards your wife, for instance, if you find one who is fairer than her, then write her a bill of divorce. And this view goes even into the home, into the kitchen and says, you know, she burns the toast or basically if she’s poor in cooking, you can give her a certificate of divorce. If there’s just anything in her that is dissatisfying to you, feel free as long as you follow the rule of the law and give her a bill of divorce, you’re free to go your way. And even the most strict sects in Jerusalem at the time permitted divorce in cases of adultery. And so the Pharisee’s question is in one sense disingenuous. There’s no disagreement. The answer should be in the affirmative. Yes, it is lawful. But there are plenty of disagreements over where the boundaries lie. And so some surmise that the Pharisees come hoping, asking this question and hoping he’ll pick a side and therefore have an enemy to this side. A problem with one of the other ends of the spectrum to kind of disrupt the crowd a little bit of those who are for him and those who are against him. But it’s probably a bit more sinister even than that. And Mark, I think hints at this when he tells us that Christ has moved into new geographical area. And what’s going on in this area? Where does he go to? He comes into the area that’s ruled over by Herod Antipas. We met him before, you’ll recall, earlier in Mark. And the last time we saw and heard of him, he was serving up John the Baptist’s head on a platter. And you’ll remember the reason that John was so disliked by Herod, and in particular Herodias, his wife, was that John kept complaining that Herod had no right to steal his brother Philip’s wife and to marry her. and that John had complained about the adultery that Herod was in the midst of. You’ll remember Herod had a marriage that was granted for political reasons. His brother Philip had a wife, Herodias, and one day Herod goes to visit him and sees Herodias, which is his niece, both of their nieces, and he ends up being attracted to her, and she to him, and he decides he wants to marry her. She divorces Philip, And the wife back home flees because she feels she’ll be killed if he gets back home with a new wife, and she flees to her father’s kingdom, and then they return Herod and Herodias, and everyone is supposed to be okay with it. And John makes the complaint, you can’t do that. You’re, as one of the rulers of the Jews, you’re acting immorally. And so now Jesus is in this region, and so they’re asking him a question, that comes back to this. So what about divorce, Jesus? And many figure, hoping that Jesus will take a hard line like John did, and maybe his head could end up on a platter, and all other problems would go away. But regardless of their reasoning, we know the motive behind it to test him is in a way that he might fail and in some sense lose or damage his way in his ministry.

The Permission

So if that’s the test that they bring with this question, Christ’s response, the first answer in his response is the permission, right, the permission. It says in verse three, he answered them, what did Moses command you? And they said, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away. And Jesus said to them, because of the hardness of your heart, he wrote you this commandment. And so Jesus says, you have a question for me? What does the Bible say? You don’t need to ask me, what did Moses teach you? And they immediately run to the text that we read this morning, Deuteronomy 24, and they said, Moses said, we just need to write her a bill of divorce. And what’s interesting here, I think a lot of times we read these texts and we think, we live in an age where divorce is rampant. And we think that we’re the only age in which it was like this. But there are pretty liberal divorce policies at this particular time in Jewish culture. It wasn’t like what we perceive. We go back 50 or 60 years, a generation before mine and beyond, and many of us didn’t even know anyone who had experienced divorce. And then we look at our own day and age, and it’s very hard to find children who haven’t had the same, who’ve had the same set of parents all their life, that are still together. And so we think, well, that’s the way the world has been always, because it’s what we’ve seen in our generation, but it’s not the case. The Pharisees, they come and they say, hey, Moses just said write us a bill of divorce, as long as you keep that particular commandment, you can be on your way. But notice what Christ’s response is to it, this question. He says, Moses wrote that because of the hardness of your heart. And what Christ is trying to say by this is, and we’ll see in the next section, is that Moses is writing a law to adapt to a particular situation, that is, after the fall, sin is prevalent. Sin made its way into the world, in particular into the Jewish nation. And in order to quarantine or help slow the effects of sin and all the collateral damage that could come from it, Moses says what? When this bad thing takes place or when this thing is not ideal takes place, make sure that you at least write a bill of divorce in hopes of protecting the woman who’s being left. And the reason for this, is that this woman is now gonna be on her own with no hope of employment, no real prospects for the future as far as the sustenance of her life. And so Moses is saying, at least give her this, this bill, so that if she’s pursued by another man, she has the right to remarry, and you can’t come back later on and take her, right? It’s not just, well, I didn’t mean that. That was just in the heat of the moment type thing. And so the protection for her safety, Moses is saying, if this situation happens, at least you do, you should write her a bill of divorce for her own protection. It was helpful for future abuse to protect against that. It didn’t sanction the abuse in the first place. But now in Christ’s day, it’s being used as a pretext, a kind of positive commandments, right? And so what’s the rule of divorce? Just write a certificate. That’s all you need to know.

The Intention

But Christ says, no, it was because of the hardness of your heart, your hard hearts, that this is the case. This was never God’s intention. This wasn’t what God was aiming at. And so notice we go from permission to intention, and the text makes this transition. And Christ begins to expand what marriage is all about, what marriage is for, not that he permitted divorce. And you’ll notice that when Jesus says, what did Moses teach? They run to Deuteronomy. and they post a situation, they’re sinning, right? This is, again, this is like pre-fall, right? Sin has entered the world. And they start to look at this divorce caveat. And Jesus says, no, no, let’s go way beyond that, right? Let’s go before Deuteronomy. Let’s go to the beginning. Let’s read what Moses wrote way back in Genesis when God introduced marriage into creation. Let’s look at what it says about what God was intending for man and woman who’ve been joined together in this particular institution of marriage. Moses taught this as a positive, and he taught the other as a consension due to the negatives that had come into the world. The illustration has been made by some. That’s a good illustration. If you were to take someone on a tour of an airplane and you were to show them an airplane seat, and they say, well, I’ve never seen this before. What is it? Your response is it’s a flotation device. You’re telling them something about deceit that is true, but it’s not deceit’s intention, right? The intention of deceit was for you to sit in it, to get in the plane, and to take off, and then to land again, and never use it as a flotation device. But the fact that it can be used as one, if everything goes horribly wrong, it can become that. But to define its use, when things are broken does not define the intention of the thing. Right, does that make sense? To define is used by the, when things are broken does not define the intention of the thing. And Christ’s saying, you’re looking at marriage once it’s broken and looking at the rules for, okay, now what do I do in an emergency landing situation? He says, I want you to look at what it was intended to be before things were broken, that you might fully and truly understand what I was aiming at to begin with. It’s like the Old Testament gives us rules concerning things like polygamy as well. It’s not a sanction for them. That doesn’t mean that his intention for marriage was polygamy. And so we see this in several places in Scripture. So he focuses down on the beginnings of marriage. And notice what he says as he begins to quote Genesis. He says, From the beginning, God made them male and female, and therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife. Christ makes it clear that at the very beginning of this maleness and femaleness, and one of each is foundational to the realities of marriage. There’s no recasting or ability to redefine that. It is set. And this really does take marriage, takes one man and one woman. And so the agenda of our current day is to try and destroy that, try to change that. Clearly, according to Christ, according to the Old Testament, according to the New, That is something beyond the pale of Scripture that is not God’s intention for marriage, and the one who created it, the Lord himself, he created it, what, for man and for woman to be joined together. Now, with that said, I don’t want us to get hung up there, because that’s not typically the struggle that we have in the church, right? Most of us aren’t struggling over whether we should define marriage as male and female. And a lot of times, there’s so much battle in the culture in the wars of the culture out there over this issue that we neglect the fact that Christ is going to say a whole bunch more about marriage that we need to take very seriously. And the church often doesn’t take nearly as seriously as the fact that a man and a woman are necessary parts for a marriage. Culture takes the second part as seriously as we take the issue of homosexual marriage. We might be more of a voice in the conversation if we didn’t disparage marriage by things like easy divorce and convenient divorces. If we honor marriage and what it was intended for, perhaps fully, maybe our voices would be heard a little more clearly. So we can’t disparage marriage as easily divorcing people and having no reason to do so, but being unhappy and after leaving and then saying, by the way, how dare you redefine marriage by man and man, right? It’s the whole thing. must be taken. Both are equally problematic in God’s eyes. No fault divorce and homosexual marriage, they’re both equally problematic. Both are undermining the definitions and the realities of marriage. And so he says, first of all, male and female are foundational for marriage. And then he makes it plain that a man and a woman are to leave and to cleave, the two are become one flesh. So they’re no longer two, he says, but one. And this is really where I think most of our problem in the conception of marriage in this culture find their grounding. Christ may explain that what was formerly separated in two different families, what was formerly two different individuals, when they joined in marriage, they lose their individual identity and they become one flesh. One flesh. And that is so contrary to our culture, foundationally. There’s no longer me and you, but there’s us. And the way that we function together needs to be focused on that fact that we have joined into one. So many times you hear when people decide to break a marriage, they say things like, I was unhappy. But notice that the main subject in that sentence is me, myself, my pleasure, my happiness. And there’s no concern for the we that was entered into. There is a bond that is made in marriage, much more than just the physical bond sexually. God says there is a union and a communion in marriage that’s not to be broken. that is a oneness and everything is then you, right? Right? And this individual is singular. Every way that you go forward in that marriage is to be viewed through the lens of we are now one. And the decisions we make and the lives that we live are to reflect that I am concerning myself, considering myself, united to someone else and out of their best interest and their best interest of us, now that we are a whole unit and this oneness. The sentiment isn’t what all the romance novels and the movies are to give you, tell us. We see often, I felt like I was losing myself. The plan of my life wasn’t measuring up the way that I had wanted it. Notice what’s there again in that thinking. I am an individual. I have certain goals. I have certain wants. If you met the goals with me, you can come along, but if you don’t, I’m gonna leave you behind. as opposed to I’ve given up those things and joined my life to yours. And now the two have become one and my greatest commitment is to you and to our remaining unified in this thing called marriage. American marriages sadly are often based on my feelings, my happiness, my needs. And you’re only as good to me as long as you’re serving the things that I want. And that is not the picture that God gives us, but rather to lose those individual identities and join as one. And notice it’s clear in the text that God is the one who joins them. God is the author of marriage, not a political institution, not a cultural fad. God is the one who defines and is the author of marriage. He’s the one that’s instituted and it’s before him that our marriages take place. He is the Lord over marriage. God was the first one ever to preside over a marriage, over a wedding in a garden. He was the original minister in that particular ceremony as he joined these two together, Adam and Eve. And whatever decisions are gonna be made by these two have to go through the one who actually ordained and authored it. It’s not their decision to make, it’s not their union to break. It’s not the whim of the husband who just writes out a bill of divorce because he’s frustrated. It’s God himself who decides when and if a marriage can be ended. And this should be for us as well. When we hear what God has joined together, let no man separate. What God has joined together, let no man separate. It’s not up to men and women to their decisions and their happiness and their wants. It should be a resounding no in our ears when we hear the word divorce, by and large. And you know, again, there are exceptions to this and we can discuss those someday, but not this day. What the text wants to get through to these Pharisees and to us is that when you think of divorce, it should have all the negatives in our mind as we’re looking at our own marriages and saying, this is not an option. This is not on the table, separating, divorcing. What God wants for this marriage, the one who ordained it, the Lord, is that no man is called to separate it until God himself does so, either by his coming or through death. This decisive no to divorce provides a safeguard against our own selfishness, and we need that. We need that to give ourselves to another, as is modeled in Christ and in the church. And so if your marriage is based on your own happiness and your own delight, how long will that hold? How long will that last? Well, maybe a long time, but if it gets, if it’s really going to be, if it gets hard, is it gonna be, I’m out, right? I’m out. No marriage would survive that sort of testing. for the realities of the difficulties of life that will come when two sinners are bound together in everything. It’ll require some amount of patience and stamina and willingness to suffer for the other till death do us part. needs to actually mean something to us, those words. Till death do us part as a Christian church, as the Christian, as the people of God. And so as you young people think about considering marriage and look forward to being married, don’t enter into it with this misconception that just as long as you’re happy or when it’s easy, right? We hear those really lame rewriting of the marriage vows. I promise you this and that. As long as we both are happy, it’s really offensive. to God. You go into it knowing that life comes with sometimes brutal and unexpected changes and challenges. But your commitment to that person is going before the face of God, and by his help will outlast those changes and those difficulties and those unaccepted changes. And, you know, you hear all the time, well, you know, I just changed. I just changed. Not the same person. Well, no joke. It’s been, you know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago. You shouldn’t be the same person. They’re not the same person that I married. Well, I know they’re not because they’ve been around you for 10 years or whatever. Of course you’re gonna change. We’re experiencing years in life together. You’ll not be married to the same person you said, I do to 20 years ago. It won’t happen and it shouldn’t happen. God didn’t intend it for that. Marriage is a means of sanctification, right, as well, as we grow in everything in life. He intended it to be for us, for our mutual growth and benefits, and ultimately for the glorifying of his name and the expansion of his kingdom. And so, brothers and sisters, marital bliss is not promised in Scripture. There’s no promise of marital bliss. And the sooner that we get this misconception out of our mind, and have our brainwashed brains washed by the truths of Scripture, the sooner we realize that there are many blessings and happinesses that do come in marriage and that can come in marriage, but this is not the solitary goal or final intent for our being joined together, but rather God is the one who oversees it, ordains it, and orders it, and it’s the only one that has permission to give one the right to end it.

The Purpose

And so we go from the test of the question to the permission To finally, Christ makes clear, answering this loaded question and answering it from permission to purpose. And then there is also the penalties for severing it, the penalties for severing it at the end of our passage. You notice that that section where it says, whoever commits, I’m sorry, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And she who divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. You see, Jesus is dealing more with the issues at hand, right? He’s saying, therefore, if any remarriage is, sorry, he isn’t saying, therefore, if any, therefore, any marriage, remarriage is always wrong, right? He’s not saying that. It’s very clear precedent inscriptions, it’s not the case. But he’s saying, in this kind of situation where you’re saying, I can easily write a bill of divorce, I’m no longer happy with you. Don’t think that when you go institute something else, that it’s all of a sudden blessed, right? That it’s doing the one which is sinful, doesn’t negate the second one also being sinful, right? Don’t think that that’s not the case. This is not unrighteousness. Don’t think that it’s not unrighteous in God’s sight in this situation, which is what John was going after with Herod when he said, it is not right for you to take your husband’s wife. What you’re doing is committing adultery. because you have severed that which was not to be severed. And he pursued something that is unrighteous. The main thing in view in this text very clearly is the unavoidable nature of marriage. This is not to be broken. We can get into all of the what ifs, but that is not the goal of this text. The goal of this text is for us to find, not to find an escape hatch. When we focus here, we begin to see marriage rightly. Notice where the text is coming. It’s coming in the midst of Christ teaching his disciples what it means to walk along the way with him. We see that marriage is part of the call to discipleship. Part of that discipleship is rightly viewing what God has ordained in our lives. It’s here that we see Christ seeking to overcome the hardness, our own hardness of heart. God does indeed forgive. But do we hear this call to marriage and to the permanence of marriage and take it seriously as his disciples? If not, it will have consequences. There will be penalties. And I don’t mean the obvious consequences in family and what it does to children and all of those things and those relationships, but grave spiritual consequences if we flippantly do this kind of thing, if we deal flippantly with it. You may have known people that pulled away from your life, from church or otherwise, from family and from God, and you bump into them later after not seeing them for a while to find out that they’ve got a new spouse and a new marriage and family and nothing to do with God. I probably, as I was preparing for this, I probably heard three times this week, People say they pursued new ways of spirituality. They’ve abandoned their faith of their youth. In other religions or new older demonic cults or hallucination ceremonies. And all of them cited as a cause, rigid structured religion that they grew up in. That was black and white and full of judgment, right? Like how sad to see all of scripture and the faith through the eyes of the law, of heavy gospelist churches. And that’s a condemnation for those churches, but really how ignorant it is for these people to ascribe to our faith those kinds of representations. I understand the personal sensitivity and the hurt of bad churches. Would I condemn math if I was taught that two plus two equals five? Does that make math bad? Of course it doesn’t. Math is still real. I’ve just been given a lie, a straw man of what math is in the eyes of those who taught me. Something was said to be math that really wasn’t math. And so many people run away from the faith that is a straw man. It’s not really the faith. It’s merely an excuse to flee. Don’t ever be fooled into thinking theology doesn’t matter, I guess, right? It means everything. So people we run into, they say they have a new way of thinking, they’ve rethought things like one way to God and judgment and Jesus and all the rest. And we see in this, the stepping stones, right, down, down, down, what begins as we’re unhappy, we’re gonna pursue this, was really just a revealing of something far more serious. which was me and mind and I as the most important, the utmost important, the greatest good is me and my feelings, that my God is myself. This is where I will dwell. This is what must be worshiped and satisfied is myself. And it was something of something deeper, a deeper problem, but it finally worked its way out as they continue to say no to the Lord and yes to themselves. Christ the King has come, we have to remember, to make all things new, to make the blind see, make the lame to walk, the deaf to heal, to the broken to be made whole, the crooked to be made straight. And he intends the same for marriage. We must see Christ didn’t come to leave us in the hopeless situation that we were in when we were dead in our trespasses and sins. He has come to give life to the dead and hope to the hopeless. to reorder us and to reorder our priorities and to reorder our priorities as regards this particular institution of marriage. And some of that reorienting will be very painful to us. Many of you here might suffer in your marriages. Much pain is caused in that relationship, right? We think we can just do the Sunday morning thing and go to church and we’re all dressed up and we just pretend. And of course, those aren’t realities for many of you, hopefully most of you. But it’s true, some have very, very difficult relationships. And it’s a hard pill to swallow when you ask the question, maybe this is what God has ordered for me in this existence. Is God sovereign? He is sovereign. But notice where this teaching is coming. It’s right after he’s told the disciples, I’m headed to the cross. And part of your discipleship will be to pick up your cross and follow me. And so for some of you, God is calling you in a marriage for that to be part of your cross bearing and to endure it with patience and loving kindness and hope, knowing that God really is able to restore. And even if he doesn’t in the way that we would want, to know that his ways and his ends are right and to trust him in all things. This would include us. agreeing with God’s design for marriage and removing the option of divorce from our minds, realizing, right, completely realizing that the reason we will desire to keep walking forth in discipleship, even in the midst of tough marriages, is because Jesus came and was willing to suffer and to endure and to secure for himself a bride that he promises he will never separate himself from, that he will never, never leave or forsake. He left his father’s side in order that he might cleave to us, his church, and that those two might become one and never be divided again. He sought our good and he sought God’s glory above his own happiness in order that you might be made whole. And the grand irony is in his pursuit and willingness to suffer, he’s been anointed with the oil of gladness above his brothers, the oil of gladness. He did not miss out even on those things. And this world keeps saying, if I do that, I will miss the good. I will miss my own happiness. I will miss my own prosperity, the things that I desire in life. And God says what in response? He says, I have a son who went and pursued a bride that did not love him. She was not lovely or lovable. And after he suffered and gave up his own happiness in order to secure her future bride, and that son has joy evermore and gladness at my right hand. Christ did this in order to overcome our hardness of hearts. He came to die that we might have a different view of these sorts of things. He did this so that he could forgive sinners who have already failed in this way. Christ came to secure a bride who has already been polluted in every possible and imaginable way. And those of you, those of us who are today have already failed in this. Christ is a savior for these sorts of sinners like you and I. Sinners who failed in their lives and failed in their marriages. And the glory of our salvation is that we don’t have to wallow in the same manner of thinking and doing that we’ve been stuck in since our birth in Adam. He has come to clear your consciences. through his death, and that you might say, no, I want to think in a different way. I want to live in a different way. I want to pursue my marriage in a way that is wholly different than I have before, to reorder our priorities after the Lord’s priority. Now forgiven, he gives back. He gives us back to this life, and he says to the disciples along the way, this is to be your view of marriage. This is how you are to order your relationships. This is the gift that I wanted to give in your salvation. So may we see what Christ has done in order to come to win his bride, and may we let it break down our own hard-heartedness, even one towards another, in all the relationships in our lives, especially our marriages. Let’s pray.

Our almighty and loving God, we praise you. We delight to give you that praise. We thank you for your providence in our lives. and for our beloved Savior who gave his life for our sins and rose again for our justification. We pray that you would continue to strengthen us and protect us. Help us to walk in Christ in this pilgrim life. Help us to know and believe and trust in your strength. Help us to know that you are working in us, your sovereign will, that you are transforming us, conforming us to the image of our Savior, Jesus Christ. We ask also, Lord, that you would continue to bless this church, place in our hearts a longing for your name to be spread, to delight in your way, to live true and faithful lives. We pray, strengthen all of us to show the love and grace that we’ve been shown, to invite people to come and hear of your mercy and holiness and to hear the gospel and be confronted with Christ, the only hope for life in this world and the next. Bless us, Lord, we pray, and help us as we have opportunity to show your love through our lives and our lips to one another. We pray, Lord, for the officers of this church, that you would give wisdom, give them love to care for your people, bless them in their work. For all of us, we pray, Lord. We ask, be merciful unto us, provide for our needs, physical and spiritual. Strengthen us spiritually. and conform us evermore into the image of our king, your son, all for your glory. For it’s in his name that we pray, amen.